TrueGentleman

Padnick could also have contrasted the Batman with another non-superpowered, gadget-orientated wealthy vigilante: The Green Arrow. Oliver Queen (another obvious aristocratic allusion) started out in the shadow of Batman but graduated from fighting a mentally ill, clown-themed nemesis to fighting for the rights of the underprivileged and for social change.

After all, Robin Hood, Green Arrow's inspiration, was an English aristocrat who didn't forget about the common folk in his crusade against corruption. Batman's is a drunken Viennese partygoer with a grudge.

To underscore this thesis, he then contrasts the Dark Knight (an ambiguous aristocratic nickname if ever a superhero had one) with his famous rogues gallery:
Let's see Christopher Nolan or Grant Morrison take on that theme if they truly want to update the Batman's legend.

The director, Michael Jelenic, agrees:
Nerdrage is an uncontrollable beast.

Ah, the great lost hope of Dollhouse. Whedon, in his hubris, thought he could fuse high-concept science fiction with dumb network television - something like The Girl Who Was Plugged In crossed with Charlie's Angels. Unfortunately, Whedon was dealing with Fox again and delivered more of the latter than the former (his own decision, really). His choice not to produce it for a cable network continues to baffle the show's ambivalent fans.

If you can, check out the much more intricate pilot that comes with the Season 1 DVD.

Things are beginning to veer into the subjective at this point. I wasn't thinking of just length of writing, but also impact, which is tricky to target. I maintain that Lee & Kirby's five-year run on FF, or even John Byrne's, is going to be impossible to match these days under current industry conditions, no matter who gets killed off, temporarily. I concede, however, I've no method of proving this, at least not until I gain the power of the Cosmic Cube and am able to bend reality itself to my merest whim.

Unfortunately, by that time, Johnny Storm will have long since returned from the dead and will re-team with the Fantastic Four to stop me in a multi-issue crossover story arc.

At this point, I felt I had to resort to Google instead of my hypotheses, and yes, it looks as though these days one can buy 500GB of SFX on a hard drive for under $10 grand.

The BBC even offered a CD of classic sound effects, from the original series Doctor Who to Blake's 7 and H2G2, by their Radiophonic Workshop.

That's quite true. And over in D.C., they famously re-negged on Barry Allen's permanent death in Crisis on Infinite Earths - the modern precedent for these worn-out tropes - and brought him back when interest in the Flash comic book was flagging.

In addition to the examples from Bendis and Morrison above, Brubaker is also currently scripting the creator-owned Criminal and a sequel to Incognito (also from Icon). Even Johns says he'd like to produce creator-owned work some time (i.e. when contract negotiations come up).

(EDIT: As an aside, if I'm not derailing myself, it's significant that despite the first-rate talents of these various writers, none of them have yet produced a defining masterpiece. It's entirely possible that spreading themselves among these various projects, for both financial and creative reasons, caps their quality at a certain level.)

Bendis is concurrently writing his creator-owned series Powers (published by Marvel's Icon imprint at present), and Morrison did his best work on his creator-owned The Invisibles (for DC's Vertigo). While Marvel and DC aren't exactly bribing them with these arrangements, I'd argue that such concessions smooth negotiations when signing them up on company-owned properties. Even then, Bendis and Morrison apparently get to pick and choose which A-list characters they wish to put their creative marks on, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, it's significant that neither of them have launched original titles/characters or rebooted existing mid-list ones for either company, the way Frank Miller did with Daredevil and Alan Moore with Swamp Thing. Neither party is going to make those mistakes again - Miller and Moore burned their bridges over creative issues, including rights to their characters, and Marvel and DC appear to have learned to avoid alienating top talent.

At the moment, the debate over work-for-hire and creator-owned projects among comics writers has moved on to how to balance the two while earning a living, now that the latter is conclusively viable. I predict that it will be sooner rather than later that comics will resemble regular publishing in terms of author copyright.

Of course, Johnny Storm will have returned from the dead well before that.


(Geoff Johns, although a fan favorite and good comics writer, just isn't on the same level as Bendis or Morrison. The former has the sharpest ear for dialogue of anyone writing superheroes today, and the latter continues to pull out uniquely mind-bending ideas from deep within his imagination.)

Why do I have a feeling that a toy aimed at six-year-olds may not be sufficiently appreciated as a tie-in to a show from the 1960s? Is Paramount going to revamp the "original series" as Star Trek Babies?

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and played as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things ... except for the ones that are now labelled "collectible figures".

Having unpacked the sound files of most of the video games I've played, I now constantly hear the same SFX crop up in television shows and movies, even when I didn't notice anything before. It's like the Wilhelm Scream except for airlocks, video display power-ups, mecha stomps, etc. While I've never investigated the source, my theory is that there's the equivalent of a SFX collection that circulates, whether through sales or bootlegs, among the foley artists in the entertainment industry.

Leaving aside the question of whether comics readers prefer never-ending serial narratives to closed ones - that's a fascinating topic but far too involved to derail this FF-oriented thread - work-for-hire writing was the old model of comics, the one under which Siegel and Schuster, then their heirs, had to fight against in court to win the rights to their creation. Their object lesson hasn't been lost on the current generation of comics writers, particularly not after Neal Adams et al.'s work to establish the concept of creator ownership in comics and the successes of such self-published titles as Cerebus the Aardvark, Spawn, TMTN, etc., etc. Marvel and D.C. are never going to be able to strike such a deal out from their hired-gun writers again. If they're going to sign up someone a for a year (the minimum for a solid arc), they're either going to have to pay sufficiently for it or make a bargain over the created content.

Business conditions in the comics industry have changed to such an extent that Fantastic Four will never see runs like either the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Silver Age or John Byrne's Bronze Age again. Quesada's model of over-arching events and temporary die-offs executed by a rotating series of jobbing writers is an attempt to forestall the inevitable changes the format will have to undergo to survive.

/soapbox

There's also a strong element of the messianic to his propaganda (e.g. the come-to-Jeebus pose in the "Unity" poster).

Statesman, on the other hand, doesn't seem interested in PR of any sort. Is that why people freely speculate about sordid secrets in his personal life and portray him in sig files as a piñata?

Yes, I know, ein, ein, ein, etc. The point is that Tyrant is a different kind of tyrant. Your other poster was right on target.

But how come nobody wants to do a poster plugging Statesman? One would think that a simple Uncle Sam/Lord Kitchener index finger-pointing pose would have been done by now.

It could just as easily be reworked for Reichsman as it could be Godwinned.

When it comes to Praetorian propaganda, Tyrant presents himself more along the lines of a televangelist when he's not posing as a "hero" or "guardian":



P.S. This thread is already messing with Google's image results when I try to find what, if any, posters feature Statesman.

Just to get this out of the way, Tyrant, in his farewell to the player in the Paragon City option for Loyalists, freely confesses to having hands "stained with blood", a policy against allowing humanity free will, and plans to "wipe away" Primal Earth. If you won't take him at his word, then there's no convincing you that the epithet Tyrant is appropriate.

Back to the topic at hand:
Don't forget the Television!

And if you want to shake up Captain Britain or Swamp Thing by killing them, you're a genius provided you have great ideas about new directions for these middle-rank characters after their resurrections.

Nobody believes for a moment that corporate publishers will intentionally destroy their own grade-A intellectual property (and that's what the work-for-hire creations of Golden and Silver Age comics characters are, in the end). True believers, however, can perceive these panicked PR stunts by the desperate dinosaurs of the comic book-industrial complex for what they are.

Marvel and DC can neither move forward with new ideas because their financial model cannot abide by creator-owned characters, nor keep their old properties fresh and vital because that risks upsetting their financial model as well. These "death of" gimmicks seem like a subconscious admission that the joint holders of the "superhero" tradmark are unable to keep the legacy alive but subsequently have second thoughts after euthanasia. They are otherwise in the process of shifting their business away from the "newsstand" periodical format to publishing reprints and specials (you know, like normal publishers). In the meantime they have to resort to poorly conceived multi-arc crossovers and transparent stunts to generate attention for their flagging flagship monthly titles. Serial literature went through a not dissimilar upheaval with novels in the 19th century as the evolved from periodical publication to the single volumes, and pulp fiction in the 20th. Comics are the next format that will have to adapt, in their own way.

For my part, I'm just buying mostly independent, creator-owned comics where I can be assured of a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe it's time to purchase the paperback edition of Unstable Molecules - now that was an intriguing new take on the Fantastic Four.

Not exactly. Last year, Paris Hilton won the Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress of the Decade for her trifecta of awful performances in The Hottie and the Nottie, House of Wax and Repo! The Genetic Opera, which was Repo's only mention in the nominations that year. She didn't bother to pick it up in person, unlike Sandra Bullock (who won Worst Actress for All About Steve).

It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, has the fortitude and/or sense of humor to collect their award in person this year.

One can almost hear Quesada's flop-sweat dripping in the further quote from his non-denial denial:
Creative bankruptcy never sounded so much like something vetted by lawyers.

Yogi Bear wuz robbed!

The Worst Career Achievement Award has an eclectic list of recipients, also including Linda Blair and Bruce the mechanical shark from Jaws. Irwin "The Master of Disaster" Allen may have been among the best at what he did - in that respect the antithesis of Uwe Boll - but he was, inarguably, a schlockmeister.

There was also the 1998 live-action bomb Tarzan and the Lost City.

At any rate, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra director Stephen Sommers is apparently still attached to direct this reboot/remake.